


this vast firmament

by xenoglossy



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space, F/F, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-15 08:38:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13609650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoglossy/pseuds/xenoglossy
Summary: Natasha, a military officer, and Sonya, a medic, have been posted together to a remote space station, far from the front of the raging galactic war.





	this vast firmament

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Synergic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/gifts).



There were few soldiers on space station Alpha-523. It was far from the front, and while not devoid of culture or commerce, it was not so essential as to be an especially inviting target. Lieutenant Natasha Rostova (a rank obtained through good breeding rather than merit) was there because her family was just important enough to pull strings and grease palms to keep their daughter out of real danger without being so prominent as to be concerned about the effect that this might have on their reputation.

Sonya was there because Natasha was. They’d been companions since childhood, and Natasha’s parents hadn’t wanted to send Natasha off without anyone to keep an eye on her, so Sonya had trained as a medic (a role she could stomach better than that of a soldier, unlikely though it was that she’d ever see combat) and gone along.

Sonya minded the state of affairs less than Natasha did, though Natasha’s dissatisfaction had less to do with any desire to see combat than with the fact that her fiance, Andrei, was posted elsewhere. She spent every spare moment writing lengthy messages to him. Sonya watched her sit there day after day with her head bent over the console, writing or waiting for responses that were few and far between even accounting for the distances involved. Seeing her like this, Sonya felt an ache she couldn’t identify. Empathy, she told herself, for Natasha’s heartsickness.

***

It should not, perhaps, have been a surprise when Natasha fell in love with someone else. Anatole was handsome and charming and Sonya disliked him immediately, with a vehemence that was not, if she was honest, entirely justified by her rational concerns. Nevertheless, she thought the rational concerns merited a mention, and so she tried to bring them up with Natasha.

“He’s your subordinate,” Sonya began. “It’s not allowed.”

“That’s just a technicality,” Natasha said. “It’s not like we’re ever in a situation where it really matters, and anyway, he says no one cares around here. He personally knows dozens of officers who have had relationships with subordinates.”

 _And you believe him?_ Sonya thought, but it would have been an unhelpful remark, so she pressed on to her next point. “And then there’s the matter of _why_ he’s in that position.”

“He was demoted.”

“Yes, but when anyone asks why, he evades the question.”

“It’s painful for him to discuss.”

“Has he told _you_ why, then?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Natasha snapped. There was a hardness in her expression that was totally unfamiliar to Sonya. “What matters is that we’re in love.”

“You hardly know him!” Sonya said. She could feel her face flushing with anger, hear her voice going higher than she meant it to. “And Andrei--”

“Isn’t here, and hardly answers my messages anyway,” Natasha said. “I doubt he cares one way or the other.” 

“Natasha...” Sonya began, and trailed off, unsure how to continue.

Natasha sighed, and all at once she looked like her usual self again. She took Sonya’s hand and squeezed it gently, and said, “I’m happy, Sonya. Deliriously happy, like I’ve never been in my life. Can’t you try to be happy for me?”

“Of course,” said Sonya. Why shouldn’t she be happy, after all? It had pained her to see Natasha lonely, and now rather than moping around in her quarters, Natasha was smiling, laughing, talking to people, going out. It was what Sonya had wanted all along.

Sonya told herself that it was simply because she doubted Anatole’s character, that if Natasha had fallen in love with anyone else, Sonya would feel nothing but joy for her friend’s sake. She almost believed it.

***

It all went wrong, of course, in the end. The affair was found out; Natasha was blamed. Anatole--a married man, as it turned out--painted a picture of Natasha as a wily seductress that was very convincing for being completely false. Natasha’s superiors believed it, in any case. Sonya was disgusted. Natasha had made an error in judgment, certainly, but there were worse crimes than that. But Sonya had no standing to dispute any decisions made about Natasha, so she simply sat with Natasha in her quarters and held her as she cried.

“They’re going to kick me out,” Natasha said at last, damply, into Sonya’s jacket. “I mean, it isn’t official yet, but it’s almost certain. What am I going to tell my parents? What am I going to do about my career?”

Sonya stroked her hair and said, “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” which was a useless comment, but it was the best she could do.

“I don’t know,” said Natasha. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I just--I can’t envision it.”

And that--of _course_ \--was when the alarms went off. The enemy was attacking the station.

Natasha may have been on the verge of being discharged, but for now she was still a soldier, and Sonya had her field medic duties, collecting pilots who sent out distress signals and administering a very basic sort of aid. The conversation about Natasha’s future would have to wait.

On board her tiny ship, Sonya tried not to think about Natasha and her troubles. There were more important things at the moment, she reminded herself firmly. But her eyes kept straying back to the dot on her radar screen that represented Natasha’s fighter. She was being aggressive, Sonya noticed, much more than she had ever been in training. She was getting right up next to enemy ships, pulling risky maneuvers, barely trying to avoid their fire, as if the danger were nothing to her.

As if, Sonya realized, feeling as though she’d swallowed a lump of ice, she didn’t care if she lived or died.

Natasha, whose career was in tatters, who couldn’t envision a future for herself, might even be hoping to die in this battle. Her fighter had taken heavy damage and was barely managing to fly straight anymore, but she hadn’t issued a distress call. Sonya was supposed to ignore struggling fighters if they didn’t call for help. It was a matter of prioritizing so as not to be stretched too thin. She was also not supposed to retrieve a pilot if doing so would put her in terrible danger herself. There were fewer medics than soldiers, and fewer ships like hers than fighters.

But this was Natasha. Sonya couldn’t be impartial, couldn’t reduce her to her value as a resource. (Whether she could have done this had it been anyone else was a question she could trouble herself with later.) Accelerating, she plunged into the fray, clumsily dodging enemy fire. It was fortunate most of it wasn’t aimed at her; that made it easier.

When she was halfway there, a blast hit Natasha’s ship dead on. The craft shuddered violently for a moment, and then was still.

Sonya sped up again, ignoring the voice in her mind that was whispering that it was already too late. A shot grazed her hull, and Sonya gritted her teeth--she was getting careless. But she pressed on and at last pulled up alongside Natasha’s ship. (The enemy was at least leaving it alone, more interested in the prey that was still moving.) Holding her breath, Sonya activated the mechanism that would connect her ship to Natasha’s.

She found Natasha crumpled on the floor of the cockpit. The icy cold feeling from earlier returned, spreading from Sonya’s stomach to her limbs. But then Natasha raised her head and said, “Sonya?”

There were all kinds of things Sonya could have said, but in the moment all she managed was “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not sure I can stand,” Natasha said, her voice weak and raspy.

“I’ll manage,” said Sonya.

***

 

Sonya was reprimanded for her behavior during the battle, but not relieved of her duties, which was almost a shame; she would have liked to be able to follow Natasha wherever she went next. But for now, Natasha was laid up in the infirmary with a broken leg and a few cracked ribs. Being thrown out of the pilot seat to slam against the wall of the ship wasn’t the easiest thing to recover from, it seemed.

Sonya sat by her bed for most of the first several days, hoping to be helpful, though the medical aspect was beyond her limited training and Natasha was on too much medication for the pain to be able to carry on a conversation, or to want to.

When Natasha was lucid again, the first thing she said to Sonya was, “Thank you.”

Sonya’s face flushed. “It was really nothing.”

“You risked your career to save me from a mess of my own making. A mess I wasn’t even hoping to survive, at the time.”

“And now?” Sonya said, hoping she wouldn’t regret asking.

Natasha shrugged, as much as was possible while slightly propped up in the bed. “None of it feels quite real now, but that may be the medicine.”

Not the answer Sonya had hoped for, but not the answer she had feared either. “In any case,” she said, “it doesn’t matter about my career. It was only ever a means to an end for me.”

“Because my parents wanted you to go with me.”

“Because _I_ wanted to go with you,” Sonya said, reaching out to take Natasha’s hand. “I may have had few other options, but what options I had would have been far more appealing than wasting time on a station in the middle of nowhere, except that you wouldn’t have been there.”

Natasha was silent for a long moment. “I really have been a fool,” she said at last.

“You’ve made some mistakes,” Sonya began in what she hoped was a reassuring tone, “but--”

“I’m not talking about that,” Natasha said.

And with that, she leaned over a little--very carefully--to kiss Sonya.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved your space AU prompt, and I hope I've done it justice. It felt weird putting Natasha in a position of greater social power than Anatole, but it was--paradoxically--the only way I could think of to have their association ruin this Natasha's life as thoroughly as it does the original's.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, nothing about this is the way space battles really should work, but I totally don't care.


End file.
